NINGÚN USO

The fact that these instances of violence took place within the school and the fact the school officials responded by involving police shows the ways in which “the prison is the school.” Angela Davis asks, “Can a state that is thoroughly infused with racism, male

dominance, class-bias, and homophobia and that constructs itself in and through violence act to minimize violence in the lives of women? Should we rely on the state as the answer to the problem of violence against women?”124 This reliance on outside authorities highlights the interpersonal use of violence by students as abnormal, deviant, and in need of correction while erasing the state violence in the forms of both the police and the school. Reliance on the criminal justice system also means that even though these girls exhibited hostility towards one another the day before, nothing was done to prevent these altercations and there was nothing done to ensure that they would not happen again.

If we look at the disruption of relationships that occurs in a carceral state, the school perpetuates disruption of community and familial ties as it relies on mechanisms of removal. This school-to-prison pipeline (STPP) is characterized by the punitive and overzealous tools and approaches of the criminal justice system that are being used in public schools, resulting in children being removed from mainstream education into alternative education and prison. The zero tolerance policies that result in increasing reliance on exclusionary discipline, suspension, and expulsion and result in the removal of the child from the school system for a period of time

perpetuate “a failure cycle, decreasing the opportunity to gain academic skills and appropriate social behaviors.”

While STPP researchers correctly point out a school system that has unjust policies that push students out, there is an underlying assumption that the school is a benign institution that exists to educate children and “make them better people.” Schools that are unable to accomplish this betterment point to the lack of resources that disable the administration from providing adequate services for students to deal with trauma. The belief that keeping children in school prevents them from going to prison ignores all the mechanisms in the school that make the school and the prison function in similar ways. For Althusser, the school is the most significant ISA, not just working to educate but also working to interpellate young people into their

respective roles in society. Foucault notes that the prison was actually modeled after the school and both share disciplinary tactics from their origins. With this in mind, the school shifts from being a location of learning and advancement to being an institution that functions much like the prison and works to create docile bodies. The idea that the school, like the prison, is a broken institution in need of reform aids in the creation of “solutions” to the STPP like peer mediation, and In-School Suspension that actually increase surveillance and disciplinary control. Not only does the school share the panoptic structure of the prison, the goal is one of civilizing and it does so by classifying and removing deviance and using force to punish force. The school then is a “warehouse for children,” a locale where they work, are kept, and manufactured into citizens.

The physical set up of the classroom is panoptic with the teacher positioned in the front of the classroom serving as “the annular building in the center” and the students seating arrangement is a form of “divi[sion] into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building…For the schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, not chatter, no waste of time” which makes it

possible to “draw up differences.”125 The classroom setup as well as the examination structure “makes it possible to observe performances (without there being any imitation or copying) to map attitudes, to assess characters, to draw up rigorous classifications, in relation to normal development, to distinguish ‘laziness and stubbornness’ from incurable imbecility.”126 These dividing practices work as tools of normalization making it easier to identify students who adhere to this structure as normal and those that do not as abnormal. On The Wire, the “abnormal” schoolchildren are set apart largely because of their reliance on violence and are removed from the “normal” classroom setting and sent to the special class to be further classified, ranked, and normalized.

The special classroom for the “corner boys” serves the laboratory aspects of the

panopticon, which is “used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behavior, to train or correct individuals…to try out pedagogical experiments—and in particular to take up once again the well debated problem of secluded education.”127 The special class was a classroom to prepare those troubled “corner kids” for the normal classroom. By separating ten of the most troubled kids, this class serves as a normalization machine teaching them how to control their temper and better function in a “normal” classroom panoptical setting. These are the children who “play with” the surveillance of the teacher/central tower by hiding magazines in their textbooks, throwing spitballs, starting fights, and showing a lack of respect for authority. They know when they are being watched, for they are usually the most watched, but they do not care. Constant disruption means they will be put out. As Colvin states, they know what is expected of them and act accordingly. Those successfully “normalized/civilized” would have the “privilege” of returning while those unable to “fit in” would be relegated to the criminalized inmate class.

These children are pathologized because of their use of violence and are deemed normal when they can control their use of violence.

However, by correcting the behavior of an individual student, nothing is done to control the use of violence by the state. They are pathologized as deviant without situating their violence in the larger structures. This pathologization calls into question who has a right to be hostile. In the midst of the trial, the researchers begin to further classify the students by naming and marking disorders even identifying Charlene as having Oppositional Defiant Personality Disorder128, something that would appear as normative teen resistance in another context. Through this “proliferation of disorders” the school becomes a location that can be reformed to better deal with the mental instability of its students without addressing its own mind-state. And while the conduct of the students caused their removal from their regular class into the special class, Laetitia was removed from the school entirely and placed into the juvenile detention system, a system that Assistant Principal Donnelly tells us is “only a little worse than her group home.”